Tag: Immigration

Up next we’ll be republishing a dialogue comparing immigration to the United States and to Europe originally posted to my Tumblr in September of last year. Even though it’s a dialogue, it’s more data driven than our Dialogue format here, so it’s being classified as an Overview.

OPENO: Hello, friend! Something seems to be on your mind.

RESTRICTES: Yes, Openo, I am troubled. This migrant crisis in Europe has reawakened my concerns about immigration to the West in general. While I’m sympathetic to the plight of those fleeing civil war (though not to economic migrants), I think that Westerners on both sides of the Atlantic are being extremely foolish and letting sentiment and blank slate ideology blind them to the long term, irreversible consequences of their decisions.

OPENO: Then we have very different attitudes. My “sentiment” leads me to believe that the migration from poorer to richer countries will – despite the difficulties associated with any large change – be in the end a great benefit not only to the immigrants and their descendants, but to the host nations as well. Perhaps we can use reason and evidence to bridge this gulf between us. Can you elaborate on your position more?

RESTRICTES: Both the United States and Europe are making the same mistake: they continue to import large numbers of people who are poorer and more criminal than the native population. In America, that means Latinos, mostly from Mexico. In Europe that means mainly Muslims, with the dominant ethnicity of immigrants varying by country. Despite what optimists like you think, these groups aren’t going to assimilate over time. They’re going to remain alien and even hostile to their host countries. (And I’m not even going to bother to address the obvious problems of Multikulti-style permanent multiculturalism.) We aren’t uplifting people, we’re just moving problems from far away to down the block. If this continues, we’re going to destroy what made Western countries the drivers of progress in the first place and make everyone much worse off. The first world is becoming more like the third, not the reverse.

OPENO: So your concern is not high-skilled immigration?

RESTRICTES: Correct, with a few caveats. Enough high-skilled immigration can lead to ethnic tensions, as we’ve seen in Southeast Asia’s frequent, sometimes genocidal, outbursts of anti-Chinese animus. Also similarly with antisemitism in Europe. Additionally, high-skilled Muslim immigrants may also be more likely to bring terrorism with them. But these are small issues relative to the huge numbers of low-skilled immigrants we’re dealing with.

OPENO: Very well. Then can I put your concerns into four related categories: economic, criminal, cultural, and demographic? And let’s focus on Latino immigrants to the US and leave others to the side, since they are the largest immigrant population by far.

RESTRICTES: That’s fair.

OPENO: Then let’s take them in that order, being careful to distinguish between America and Europe, because I think they have considerably different concerns. It’s cliche but true that America is a nation of immigrants. Millions and millions of people came from poor European countries to America, and they seem to have done quite well economically in the end. I will grant that there was a century of (mostly mild) ethnic tension, but few seem to regret it now or think that it was a mistake. Nobody is defined by being Italian-American anymore.

RESTRICTES: Is that true though? Appalachia was settled by poor Scots-Irish and Appalachian whites are poorer than whites elsewhere to this very day. Read Albion’s Seed or American Nations! These differences persist down to the modern day, and we’re only talking about different groups of British settlers. Different white ethnic groups still have considerably different incomes*. Scots-Irish households make $56,658, versus $72,179 for Russian-American households for instance. The past matters, even when it’s less visible because all these groups get lumped together as “white”.

* Wikipedia cites the Census Bureau for these, but I couldn’t get the dumb Census website working to double check, so perhaps discount the exactness of the numbers a bit.

OPENO: I’ll grant that economic assimilation isn’t complete anywhere. That’s obvious from looking at different economic regions of the US. But given time, intermarriage and internal migration I bet these differences will recede over time. In any case, relatively poor groups (but still quite rich!) are hardly a threat to the republic, just another normal issue to deal with.

RESTRICTES: But I was only presenting the best case scenario, of groups that become fully accepted as Americans over time. Native Americans and African Americans both have household incomes well under $40,000. And Mexican Americans are only at $40,588. That’s a big deal.

OPENO: Due to discrimination! That’s a problem that can be fixed!

RESTRICTES:Maybe, but “can” and “will” are two different things. We, as a society, have tried very hard to eliminate racism over the last half century, yet the disparity remains. There are two options: racism is subtle and very hard to eliminate, or we’ve eliminated most racism and the problem still persists. Could be cultural issues due to centuries of oppression. It doesn’t matter why. All that matters is that we don’t know how to get rid of it. Neither of those options make more immigration from a poor, visibly distinguishable minority a good idea. There’s already a lot we can’t undo, let’s not dig a deeper hole.

OPENO: Half a century is not actually a long time. (And will Latinos still be “visibly distinguishable” after generations of intermarriage, or just one end of a spectrum?)

RESTRICTES:Maybe, but are you willing to stake the country on us figuring out an apparently intractable problem?

OPENO: That’s over the top. It doesn’t need to be perfect. Some convergence would be enough.

RESTRICTES:Is 80% convergence enough? Because that’s all you’re likely to get. Third-generation Hispanic immigrants do no better than their parents in income or education. (And while we’ve just been talking about income, most other measures of well-being show the same gap.) Much like other minority groups, their income seems to grow at the same rate as whites, but from a permanently lower base. Puerto Ricans are still a very poor group overall.

OPENO: 80% doesn’t actually sound that bad? Much less than you’d want of course, but still manageable. Not as dire a picture as you’re trying to paint. Plus I’m not sure how much weight to put on those studies, given that the immigrant population is only now settling in after a period of rapid growth. But the worst case scenario doesn’t seem that bad.

RESTRICTES:For a group that will make up almost a third of Americans by 2050? That’s very sanguine.

OPENO: Perhaps, but I would bet money on Latinos doing better than that over the coming decades. Our expectations still differ, but not our facts I think. Let’s move on to Europe, where I do have concerns.

RESTRICTES: You’re right to be worried. In Europe the outlook is even worse. Let’s take France, Germany, and the UK, the three largest EU countries. Each has, over the last half century taken in a large Muslim population. France from Algeria, Germany from Turkey, and Britain from Pakistan and Bangladesh to generalize. Each has taken a different attitude towards immigrants. In France the goal was assimilation; citizens were citizens and public displays of religion were at best frowned upon. The Germans thought they were just importing temporary workers who would go away when asked. Children of immigrants weren’t given citizenship until fairly recently. In the UK the goal was harmonious multiculturalism. Yet despite these differences all these immigrant groups are doing poorly, and in some cases the second generation is not only not converging, it’s regressing. That suggests to me that government policy is simply not a very effective lever, that what’s happening is pretty much inevitable (once you allow this sort of mass low-skilled immigration).

OPENO: Regressing?

RESTRICTES: This sort of research is rather hard to find (I wonder why?), but in Germany, second generation Turkish immigrants have a bigger earnings gap relative to natives than their parents, adjusting for education. (Granted, they are somewhat more educated than their parents, which attenuates the gap somewhat.) In France, first generation Turkish men are 70.6% likely to be employed. Second generation? 41.2%. Pakistanis in the UK see an almost 14% drop in employement.

OPENO: That seems implausibly extreme.

RESTRICTES: A few caveats then. Part of the gap may be explained by differences in average age. Also I’ve cherry-picked some notable but still representative examples. But in general, this is the pattern for Muslim second generation immigrants: educational outcomes are improved, while actual economic performance mostly stagnates, with outlying groups in either direction. That’s true both for income and even more so for employment rates.

OPENO: Is this a result of discrimination?

RESTRICTES: Maybe in part, but I don’t think primarily. In Sweden, the wage gap is entirely skill-driven, with no evidence for discrimination by employers. However, there may be some discrimination in deciding who is hired in the first place. I don’t doubt that racism plays a part.

OPENO: What about non-Muslim immigrants? How do they compare?

RESTRICTES: Intra-EU migrants don’t fully converge with the natives (just like whites in the US), but they don’t generally have the same issues. But other non-white groups do much better than Muslim immigrants. Indians in Britain do much better than other South Asian groups, which seems difficult to attribute to discrimination. Given how often Sikhs are attacked as Muslims, I don’t think bigots are very good at distinguishing between minority groups. No, I think the difference is mainly in whether groups are skilled when they first arrive. There may also be concerns with Muslim communities being more culturally isolated from the broader nation, which could also have economic effects, but we can deal with that when we talk about culture.

OPENO: And this is worse than in America?

RESTRICTES: Unfortunately there just isn’t enough research to allow for a full point-by-point comparison, but I think so. For instance, there is a drop in employment among descendants of Mexican immigrants, but it’s much smaller, and basically brings them into line with non-Hispanic whites. (First generation immigrants to the US are more likely to be employed than natives, a point in your favor.) In America, there is a jump in outcomes, then just normal slow progress (but not convergence). In Europe there isn’t even really that jump.

OPENO: But if different low-skilled immigrant groups have different outcomes in different countries, surely we could study that and learn which policies work and which ones don’t? The differences imply that we aren’t just seeing the exact same process over and over, like you implied. The debate over the welfare state is another issue, but maybe European countries have created perverse incentives or something like that.

RESTRICTES: That would be worthwhile research, but consider this. If America is a positive outlier, then there might not be much room for improvement. We might already be close to the best possible outcome, even if Europe isn’t. Also, if much of the gap is due to the larger cultural gap between Europeans and Muslim immigrants than between Americans and Mexicans then there’s no reason to assume that a policy solution exists. Or maybe Americans are just more accepting of immigrants because of centuries of immigration. It’s not clear if we can fix that either. Though of course we should investigate. I don’t know the causes with any certainty.

OPENO: If I may summarize your argument so far. Low skilled immigrant groups to the US are likely to quickly converge to an educational/economic level higher than in their native countries, but considerably lower than other Americans. In Europe second generation Muslims are better educated than their parents, but are often actually worse off economically and less attached to the labor market. Whatever the best case scenario is, it isn’t an indistinguishable melting pot in either case. There are going to be problems and economic gaps for the foreseeable future.

RESTRICTES: Exactly. And while much of this can’t be undone, as I certainly don’t advocate expelling citizens from any country on ethnic grounds, this isn’t a mistake we need to keep making. We can stop letting in low-skilled immigrants at any time. Even if there’s some illegal immigration, the numbers will be much lower.

OPENO: Well, you’ve convinced me that I was naive to expect some sort of perfect economic melding between immigrants and natives. But the degree of difference matters too. After all, America holds together even if some whites make less than others. Poorer ethnic groups create problems, but ones we have a long history of dealing with. And you still haven’t shown what the actual best case scenario is, just what we’re currently on track to achieve. Maybe that’s all we can do, maybe not. Yet there are greater difficulties than I first allowed.

OPENO: In any case, there’s one huge unexamined assumption we’re making: that having more poor people in my country has a negative impact on my well-being. That isn’t at all obvious! Why should someone moving to a rich country and thereby becoming much richer themselves negatively impact me in any way? The impact may be positive if anything! Of course the economy is complex and the truth is rarely obvious.

RESTRICTES: Please explain.

OPENO: If there’s one thing that economics has taught us, it’s that letting people voluntarily trade with one another typically increases overall well-being in a society. There are exceptions, of course, but this isn’t one of them. Right now there are millions of people toiling away in poverty, using out of date and inefficient technology, or dealing with unforgiving bureaucracies, etc. You yourself said that the incomes of Mexican-Americans – a relatively poor group of immigrants – rise to 80% of the American average. That’s almost four times what they’d make in Mexico! That’s like printing money! And that money will be spent on goods and services in the US from people like us. World GDP goes up, American GDP goes up. We all win. And of course the same is true in Europe.

RESTRICTES: I’m not disputing that you can raise GDP by importing more people, but does this come at the expense of Americans or American-held jobs? That’s the question.

OPENO: Restrictes, I hope you aren’t succumbing to the lump of labor fallacy. There is no fixed amount of work to be done in an economy. As a population grows, so does demand for labor. Immigrants both work and consume. Of course, this makes perfect sense when you notice that America’s population has grown over a hundredfold since independence, yet we haven’t seen an ever-growing unemployment problem. Not only that, but after centuries of off-and-on mass immigration the US is richer than almost every country on Earth. But again, even if Latino immigrants permanently drag down America’s stated GDP per capita, that may be nothing but a statistical artifact*. Americans who aren’t recent immigrants may still be richer than they otherwise would have been. Everybody would be better off, it just might not be obvious if you look at the numbers naively.

* Is this an example of Simpson’s paradox? I’m not quite sure.

RESTRICTES: Your analysis is right insofar as it goes. It’s very hard to deny that letting people migrate to higher efficiency regions will increase overall output. (Though if those immigrants aren’t there to work but to freeload on welfare…) But looking at the aggregate like that obscures the more important question: the distribution of wealth in this new society. GDP tells us nothing about who gets what. Even if mean income for Americans goes up, median income could even decline! And, given the declining marginal utility of wealth, most Americans could be progressively worse off even as GDP grows.

OPENO: Ignoring the well-being of much better off immigrants?

RESTRICTES: I don’t think that governments should particularly consider the well-being of non-citizens (within reason, of course), but let’s leave ethics to the side and focus on actual outcomes as best we can for now.

OPENO: Agreed. Can you provide an account of how the median American might be harmed by immigrants?

RESTRICTES: Look at trade with China, which very likely has decreased wages for workers in sectors now exposed to international competition. That shouldn’t be surprising – protectionism can raise income for the sectors that are being protected. Normally we associate protectionism with giveaways to industries with lobbyist clout, but what if immigration restrictions are really protectionism for the lower and middle classes? Does it seem so bad now? We can’t undo the fact that workers in tradable industries are worse off than before. But there are many jobs that aren’t tradable but necessarily local, like giving haircuts or construction. Jobs that would have been performed by lower or lower-middle class people. Without immigration their wages were driven up, but now even they aren’t secure from foreign competition. Nobody is. The benefits accrue to wealthier Americans who need money less.

OPENO: So your argument is that, even though it lowers overall output, immigration restrictions can improve overall well-being for Americans (and analogously Europeans) because this is a case where GDP doesn’t track utility well?

RESTRICTES: Correct.

OPENO: That’s a neat story, but is it true? It seems equally likely to me that immigrants are mostly filling niches that otherwise would have gone unoccupied – making farms profitable that otherwise wouldn’t have been, or offering maid services that simply never would have been bought. The proverbial jobs that American’s won’t take.

RESTRICTES: Much of which is due to illegal immigrants undercutting the minimum wage…

OPENO: Perhaps, but that’s neither here nor there with respect to overall welfare concerns. And the evidence doesn’t support your concerns. One study found that in the short term, wages for those without high school diplomas were depressed a paltry .7%. In the long term they rose .3%, so there’s no great problem to be addressed. You’ll find most studies on both sides of the Atlantic – like this one from Denmark – support mild benefits to immigration, even for less skilled natives. New immigrants can have a negative impact on recent immigrants, which makes sense, but it doesn’t make much sense to stop immigration for that, since immigrants will still be better off for having migrated in the first place.

RESTRICTES: Unless you have a huge new population you’re desperately trying to assimilate and want to stop undermining economically… Regardless, note that a decade and a half of mass immigration – often over a million a year – raised American incomes barely half a percent. That’s essentially nothing, considering the problems brought by immigrants. It’s not a permanent increase in growth rates either, it’s a one time bump.

OPENO: But you do concede that even permanently poorer immigrants and their children won’t hurt native wages?

RESTRICTES: Yes, but again please note that the benefits for natives are really quite small, almost a rounding error. Not nearly enough to justify the social costs we’ll soon be turning to. For instance, you can hardly contribute to the labor market if you’re not working and on welfare.

OPENO: We haven’t established those social costs, so let’s not just assume them. An alternate, equally plausible framing is that we can massively benefit millions of people by letting them into our countries and benefit a bit ourselves. We’ve been focusing on the effects on rich countries, but surely you agree that the migrants themselves unquestionably benefit. Otherwise why would they come?

RESTRICTES: They’re better off, of course. That isn’t in question. Enough immigration could undermine the institutions that make the risk worthwhile, but we’re obviously not at that point yet since they keep coming. (Side note: second and third generation Latino immigrants in the US have lower life expectancies than their parents because they adopt less healthy lifestyles.) But let’s establish those costs for natives. If immigrants are living on the dole rather than working (or if they are working but still net drains on the government) then that money is being redistributed directly away from citizens. And immigrants do go to where welfare is more generous. That’s hardly surprising. Obviously there are other factors, like work opportunities, family networks, and so on. And given that Europe generally provides more generous welfare than the US, it will both draw more people looking to mooch, and spend more per immigrant. “Immigrants received over 18% of social benefits in Denmark in 1999, even though their population share was less than 3%.”*

* Section 5 of this paper is quite interesting and I did an inadequate job summarizing it.

OPENO: Okay, that’s higher than I would’ve expected.

RESTRICTES: Male immigrants to Denmark from less developed countries start out at 80% welfare dependency and then over time that stabilizes to 40%, five times higher than for native Danes. Is that enough convergence for you?

OPENO: Denmark is Denmark, what about other countries?RESTRICTES: Not as bad in the rest of Europe, but there is still a big gap between natives everywhere. Different countries get quite different results in terms of dependency. America is better still which makes sense given that employment is higher. But immigrants are still 5-7% more likely to receive benefits.

OPENO: What causes the differences?

RESTRICTES: Government policy, mainly.How easy it is to collect benefits, how generous the benefits are. Apparently little to do with either native or immigrant culture, except insofar as they affect welfare policies.

OPENO: Okay, but this all still doesn’t prove that low skilled immigrants are a net fiscal negative. After all, even in Denmark most immigrants are working. That could still be enough to cover the costs of those who are on welfare.

RESTRICTES: Unfortunately the studies on that question are all over the map, varying by country, and by the assumptions made. But there are clear generalizations. Some immigrant groups are bigger fiscal drags than others. Older immigrants are net negatives – meaning family based migration is costlier to the government. In Europe costs are higher due to more underemployed immigrants and more generous benefits. In America the lifetime net effect on the government of an immigrant can go from a loss of $36,000 to a gain of $96,000 based on their education. (And remember the negligible economic benefits.)

OPENO: I can accept that some immigrants cost the government money. I’m not sure it matters that much in the big picture.

RESTRICTES: It isn’t just that they cost the government money. It’s that the same groups drawing on welfare are also working less, are more criminal, and are less culturally assimilated. Just like how poor countries are more corrupt, have lower literacy, and higher infant mortality, etc. For whatever reason these bad things are clustered. So if we move beyond a simplistic “Are immigrants good or bad?” framework, we see that low skilled immigrants are being essentially subsidized by high skilled immigrants, which can make the whole thing seem like a fiscal wash. But we can separate the two! Restrict immigration to the skilled and it will be a clear positive!

OPENO: Isn’t restricting benefits another option? America has a smaller welfare state and immigrants get less than in Europe. That’s a less restrictive solution. Even I’ll agree that governments aren’t obligated to give people money just for showing up on the border. If people can support themselves, they’ll come and if not they won’t. That would stop most people who weren’t likely to find work, and maybe lower native opposition to immigration too?

RESTRICTES: Policy makes a difference, clearly. But there will still be millions of poor people living in rich countries. Do you think that bleeding heart liberals will be able to resist offering handouts? No, poor immigrants imply welfare.

OPENO: You don’t think you can stop welfare, but you do think you can stop these same bleeding hearts from letting immigrants in in the first place.

RESTRICTES: Looking at all of human history, out of sight is in fact out of mind.

OPENO: You have yet to convince me that welfare is a big enough cost to justify immigration restrictions, particularly if policy changes can ameliorate the problem.

RESTRICTES: Welfare is only one of the social costs, and I think you’ll find that they start adding up…

RESTRICTES: So far this discussion has been quite bloodless, focused on statistics and not emotion. That’s appropriate for abstract economics questions, but crime has an ineradicable emotional component that you have to understand, just like terrorism can’t be understood merely by measuring lives lost. Ultimately we have to decide public policy rationally, but that includes rationally understanding people’s emotional, sometimes irrational reactions. So let me open with one example, Rotherham, to show why ordinary people are so worried. In Rotherham, England, over a period of 16 years gangs of ethnic Pakistani men sexually abused over 1,400 children. Girls were “doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone.” All of this was covered up for years by officials for fear of offending immigrant communities. This wasn’t some paranoid conservative fiction, it happened. And I’m not even getting into the horrific details, I just want you to understand in some way the visceral reaction people have. People read about this and they think of their own kids. Crime isn’t just statistics to people, it’s locked doors and empty playgrounds and an inescapable miasma of mistrust. It’s quite difficult to quantify these additional costs, but as we discuss numbers, please remember that the penumbra of crime covers all of society, not just individual victims.

OPENO: I agree that not everything can be fruitfully reduced to mere numbers, but-

RESTRICTES: Here’s a number for you: 10,000 soldiers in France guarding Jewish sites earlier this year. Imagine having to send your children to a school in that environment.

OPENO: -But numbers can relieve unfounded worries. Both of your examples were from Europe, which isn’t surprising. In fact, research in America has mostly found that immigrants have a lower crime rate than natives. In Europe and elsewhere, the opposite is true.

RESTRICTES: I think that “However America is doing, Europe is doing worse” is becoming a theme. But doesn’t a lower crime seem implausible? After all, Latin America is one of the most violent regions in the world. I could accept similar or slightly higher…

OPENO: It depends in part on how you control for demographics.

RESTRICTES: I hope you don’t mean controlling for education, income, or employment. You can’t treat those as some exogenous variables! If we want to look at how much crime is actually going to be committed, you can’t just assume away that immigrants differ from the rest of the population.

OPENO: True, though that does have its uses in answering other questions. But in this case I meant that immigrants are disproportionately young men, the most criminal group. 1.6% of immigrant men age 18-39 are imprisoned, vs. 3.3% of natives, but there are more immigrants in that group. Since their children will not have similarly skewed demographics, it does make sense to adjust in that way, depending on the question you’re answering. And our discussion is about long-term immigration effects, not short-term ones. (Though even without making those adjustments, it isn’t clear that immigration increases crime. Remember that the immigrant population has surged while crime rates have dropped by half since the early 1990s.)

RESTRICTES: And does this demographically adjusted low crime rate carry over to future generations?

OPENO: Not exactly. Second generation immigrants have higher crime rates than their parents, but not hugely so. Apparently they acculturate to the surrounding environment and commit crimes at about the same rate as natives. It isn’t clear to me whether they’re adjusting for socioeconomic factors. I don’t think so, but I think they are lumping high and low skilled immigrants together which is effectively the same thing. So if a group of immigrants is poorer/less educated and the poor/less educated are more criminal, then the group will be more criminal, but not relative to other comparable groups. In that case the long term prospects for the crime rate are tied to future economic assimilation.

RESTRICTES: So it depends on whether that 80% convergence holds.

OPENO: Correct. Hispanics, most of whom are descended from relatively recent immigrants, are incarcerated at 1.8 times the rate of non-Hispanic whites, but less than a third the rate of blacks. That puts them very near the overall national average. Even if economic convergence doesn’t improve then the crime rate will not be much affected by immigration.

RESTRICTES: It still seems very implausible to me, given how crime-ridden Latin America is. I mean, tens of thousands of people have been killed in Mexico’s drug war.

OPENO: Well, the drug war is an aberration, I think, due to the proximity of a big rich country and a big middle income country. It’s exacerbating what was an already high murder rate, but isn’t itself some deep part of Mexican culture. I mean, it used to be Colombia, now it’s Mexico… Also immigrants aren’t a representative sample of their home country, so we shouldn’t be surprised that there are differences.

RESTRICTES: Perhaps. I will say again, even if this is all true America could be doing better by only taking in educated high skilled immigrants. We don’t have to settle for keeping the crime rate steady when we could be lowering it. That immigrants aren’t always as harmful as I’d expect doesn’t mean our current policies are optimal. Let’s avoid false dichotomies. And I’m not going to let you get out of talking about Europe.

OPENO: I wouldn’t dream of trying to escape.

RESTRICTES: Like you said, most studies in Europe have found a link between immigration in crime. Unfortunately, much of this research is out of date or it lumps all immigrants (sometimes including intra-EU migrants!) together. So let’s look at incarceration rates to get a better idea of how things are actually going. In France, Muslims make up 12% of the population, but between 60 and 70% of all prisoners. In Britain it’s 3% vs. 11% in prison. And so on, throughout European countries with significant Muslim immigration. (Note that there aren’t good official statistics, unlike in the US. Hmm…) By comparison, in America blacks are 13% of the population, but 38% of all state prisoners. Hispanics are 17% vs. 21%. Europe has rapidly recreated – exceeded even – America’s huge racial disparity in crime. (And don’t forget that prisons are a breeding ground for extremism.)

OPENO: That’s disturbing, but remember that America locks up way more people, so those numbers aren’t necessarily directly comparable. For instance, France’s incarceration rate is less than a seventh than that of America’s, so even if the disparity is real, the levels are still much lower.

RESTRICTES: Here we run into problems with the data. I’d like to give you varying homicide rates (generally the best for cross-country comparisons) for different groups, but France and Germany willfully don’t collect those sorts of statistics, and the UK uselessly lumps all Asians together. (It’s easy enough to find information on xenophobic hate crimes though!) In Germany, what data there is suggests that more recent refugees have higher crime rates than earlier migrants. It’s possible that what’s happening is that, as in the US, first generation immigrants have lower crime rates than their kids. However, the first generation has a similar crime rate to natives, rather than lower, so their children are dragging the crime rate up.

OPENO: But from a lower base rate than in America.

RESTRICTES: Right. It isn’t clear what’s going to happen to crime rates, or how high they might go if the immigrant-descended population continues to grow. I wouldn’t guarantee that rates will stay below America, but the data just isn’t there to make confident predictions. Though the mere fact that the data is so sparse is to me very suggestive that there is a serious problem being covered up. Not to suggest a conspiracy or anything like that, but the difference relative to the US is quite striking. However, the prison population is proof enough that immigration has increased crime significantly. And even if a high crime rate like America’s isn’t high enough to tear apart society, why should Europe give up the peaceful societies it has taken centuries to create? Remember all the secondary effects of higher crime I mentioned.

OPENO: Perhaps…

RESTRICTES: I’d also like to point out that while immigration in general doesn’t increase corruption, immigration from corrupt countries does. And, of course, Middle Eastern and Latin American countries are much more corrupt than those in the West. Government corruption is a more important sort of crime than is generally recognized, since government can work its tendrils into practically every aspect of life. Anecdotally, think of the Bell, California scandal (a city that’s 93% Hispanic). I think this just confirms people’s intuitions.

OPENO: Well, one study found no correlation between officials convicted of corruption and the Hispanic population*, but I’d like to make a broader point. Everyone knows that successive waves of immigration from Europe in the late 19th/early 20th centuries fueled the rise of corrupt machine politics in America. The machines have gone, but the corruption often lingers. (Illinois governors are literally more likely to go to jail than Illinois murderers.) Gangs and organized crime were obviously concentrated among immigrant groups. Catholics and Eastern Europeans were never going to be able to adapt to democracy, or to learn English. The poor would depress native wages. Etc., etc., etc. For a long time, many of these concerns seemed well-founded. And yet, almost nobody regrets these past waves of immigration. Eventually something changed. Assimilation happened. As we’ve discussed, it’s never been absolutely total, but it’s definitely been enough. When you look at past waves of immigration on a large enough time scale, you see success. (And a century or more is the appropriate length.) So we can look at all the numbers we have, and try to peer into the dim future, but trends change and the past is an equally important – if only intermittently quantifiable – guide. Maybe this time is different, but maybe not.

* It did find that increasing ethnic diversity led to greater corruption, but I saw other studies that found no effect.

RESTRICTES: The fact that there are such differences in outcomes between high and low skilled immigrants, and between low skilled immigrants to the US and Europe suggests that we have no guarantee that past examples of migration will map well onto current ones. And most past large migrations have been mass folk wanderings defined by violence and displacement. The experience of Europeans migrating to European colonies may be very much an exception. There aren’t enough examples to confidently analyze the causes of successful immigration and assimilation. It’s only theorizing and speculating. Even high skilled immigration probably has risks; there’s just so much we don’t know.

RESTRICTES: Let me start out by pointing out that assimilation is not guaranteed. Jews and Roma both lived in Europe for well over a millennium without fully assimilating. Of course, this was in no small part due to the hostility and bigotry of the surrounding populations, but Europe certainly hasn’t eliminated xenophobia from the human character. We live in a relatively tolerant moment, but there’s no guarantee that this will continue. If it doesn’t then today’s Muslim immigrants could easily become a permanently separate and lower status group, almost necessarily at odds with the rest of Europe. Even if there is little hostility, groups can religiously separate themselves from the rest of a nation, as with the Amish and Haredim in the United States. Of course Muslims are religiously distinct and distinctly more pious than native Europeans. Proximity does not guarantee assimilation. And giving the growing interconnectedness of the Islamic world, Muslims everywhere are now tuned in to violent, illiberal streams of thought.

OPENO: Over 90% of Muslims in France, Germany, and Britain completely reject violence against civilians.

RESTRICTES: Alarmingly low!

OPENO: If that’s how little support there is for terrorism even when the Middle East is in such a crisis, I can only imagine that it will drop further. Islam is going to modernize sooner or later.

RESTRICTES: I agree! But later could mean centuries, and until then Europe is opening itself to quite hostile streams of thought it has no control over. And as the Islamic world is tearing itself apart, in some ways European assimilation is going into reverse. In Britain in 2007 36% of 16-24 year olds believed that apostasy should be punishable by death, compared to (still alarmingly high!) 19% of 55+ year olds. For wearing the veil support goes from 28% of 55+ year olds to 74% of youths. On other measures, like support for al Qaeda and preference for Islamic schools, the numbers go in the same direction.

OPENO: Even so, you’re mostly talking about a minority of a minority.

RESTRICTES: True for now. A few percent of the population believing something terrible is normal, but my worry is autocatalyzing ethnic polarization. Some fraction of Muslims use terrorism, or gangs to enforce conformity on other Muslims for instance, which provokes an indiscriminate reaction from white Europe, which pushes Muslims to band together, likely under an Islamist ideology. (Chechnya is an extreme, perhaps not perfectly relevant example. Chechens had always been Muslim, but the wars with Russia have pushed things in a more extremist direction tied to a broader jihadist ideology.) That won’t necessarily happen, but in this climate it’s a serious risk. So far most Europeans have been mostly tolerant. (Favorable views of Muslims in France went up after the Charlie Hebdo massacre.) Yet Front National and the BNP forever lurk in the background. If some crisis pushes Europe over that edge, it may be very hard to come back from.

OPENO: I’m confused. Is your argument that we shouldn’t let immigrants or refugees in because it might worsen our moral character and make us less tolerant? That seems odd.

RESTRICTES: Persistent ethnic tensions can fuel illiberalism. I mean, think back all the way to the Spartans and Helots. Or, more recently, the violence used in the American South to keep blacks down, which was also directed at abolitionist or pro-integration whites.* Or the post-9/11 erosion of civil liberties. Or the worries about the solidity of Israeli democracy. Liberal democracy doesn’t work always and everywhere. It has preconditions. At a minimum, most groups in a country must accept liberal democracy. It can’t be forced. If even just a substantial minority utterly rejects it (or uses it solely as a tool to be cynically manipulated), suddenly the whole system starts to seem quite rickety. A fearful majority can take frightful measures. Bans on speech supporting terrorism become bans on speech supporting Islamism become bans on… All of a sudden the West has lost much of what made it worth defending in the first place. That’s what I’m worried about, more than fanciful scenarios of demographic takeover. Muslims are over 10% of the population in some parts of Europe and if they turn more hostile to modern ideas, that would certainly provoke a crisis.

* To be clear, Restrictes isn’t saying that violence against one group counts more or less, just that illiberalism can turn on anyone and any idea.

OPENO: So your concern is not diversity per se, but the beliefs of the minority?

RESTRICTES: Diversity can be a concern (remember that the Belgians can barely hold a state together), but it isn’t a death sentence. America has always been diverse both ethnically and ideologically, but it’s held together since the Civil War.

OPENO: Even if I grant that that’s a possible scenario, how likely is it in reality? Just before you were lambasting me for using historical examples to analyze the present.

RESTRICTES: I can’t think of any precedent for an illiberal minority living among a liberal majority, so I don’t think my analysis is historically based so much as trying to analyze the underlying situation and work out ways things could play out. That’s an uncertain approach, but there aren’t any certainties with any approach. Regardless, even if the risks aren’t exactly known, the possible costs seem high enough to warrant extreme caution in allowing future immigration. The Muslim population is already growing faster than the rest of Europe, and greater size means a greater risk if these trends toward illiberalism accelerate.

OPENO: The fact that there hasn’t been any example of that sort of illiberal minority seems telling. Democracy and liberalism corrode traditionalist modes of thought. People will have more to gain than lose by generally cooperating. Democracy rewards that sort of thing.

RESTRICTES: But remember that religious groups in America can keep themselves separate even against all of democracy’s promises. Obviously European Muslims aren’t the Amish, but I don’t see any reason why it would be impossible to set up some sort of self-reinforcing separate system with promises of power and rewards in opposition to the mainstream. British Muslims already have separate courts to enforce the will of the community. Social pressure can be as powerful as the government. If the majority becomes biased against the minority and the minority can no longer achieve power through normal channels, then something like that seems almost inevitable.

OPENO: I have to bring this back out of the speculative realm. While in France Muslims are less trustful of government than the broader populace, in Germany and the UK that’s reversed. Muslims have more confidence in elections, courts, and the national government in general. Nothing you worry about is theoretically impossible, but I can’t see it as anything more than spinning tales that seem plausible.

RESTRICTES: That’s an unfair way to put it, and I think that could be applied to almost all speculation, not just to what I’ve laid out.

OPENO: Speculation must be adequately backed by facts. In any case, obviously whatever problems Latino immigrants have in assimilation are quite different, so let’s turn there.

RESTRICTES: As before, I’ll note that even linguistic assimilation isn’t guaranteed. German Americans kept speaking German until World War I and Cajuns kept speaking French until World War II, both changes that required considerable outside pressure.

OPENO: German Americans tried to keep their children in German-language schools, but most kids were growing up English-dominant decades before World War I. There are no comparable institutions to keep immigrants speaking Spanish. Cajuns were geographically and culturally isolated in a way that is impossible today. And in fact, Latino immigrants seem to be following the standard pattern where the second generation is bilingual and the third primarily speaks English. Only 1% of third generation immigrants aren’t at least bilingual and a majority don’t speak Spanish at all. That seems pretty overwhelming and completely unsurprising compared to past waves of immigration.

RESTRICTES: I’ll accept that.

OPENO: And as far as political values? Native born Hispanics are… 6% less likely to be conservative than the rest of America. Third generation Hispanics are more likely to support bigger government, but there’s a huge convergence with the rest of America over generations. The third generation’s attitudes towards homosexuality and abortion are indistinguishable from the rest of America. I’m not saying that immigrants are adopting good or bad norms, just that they’re adopting extremely boring generic American norms. There isn’t some wave that’s going to completely reshape the US. (Remember how the grandkids of European immigrants became Reagan Democrats.) It’s a big population, so even small shifts from the norm can make a difference in politics, true, but the change is moderate overall. Also note that a plurality of Latinos see the US as having better moral values than their home countries.

RESTRICTES: That’s somewhat comforting, but I’m not sure it cuts to the heart of my concerns. Remember at the beginning of this conversation, when we discussed how white Americans with different ancestries can still be distinguished centuries later? I’m more worried about these less-easily measured deeper folkways persisting.

OPENO: Then what is your worst case scenario? Here’s one plausible outcome. The American Southwest becomes sort of a second Appalachia. Culturally distinct but still recognizably American, poorer than average, but not overwhelmingly so, maybe with somewhat more social problems as well. Perhaps that’s suboptimal in some way (though it’s great for the immigrants – something we keep losing sight of) but I simply don’t understand the general caterwauling. What is so awful about this picture? You can’t realistically say that this is some fifth column bent on Reconquista. People are assimilating! American culture is extraordinarily attractive to people! Immigrants are coming to work and to raise families, not to bring to life nativist fever dreams! And it’s not like Mexico or Latin America are so wildly alien; it’s not like we border the tribal regions of Pakistan. Mexico seems to me like Spain, but poorer and a few decades of development behind. You’ve convinced me that immigration can be difficult yes, but what are you really so worried about?

RESTRICTES: Well… I’m not so sure that our society encourages assimilation anymore. “Hispanic” is basically an arbitrary census category designed to create a unified ethnic bloc. Affirmative action and multiculturalism reward separatism, rather than assimilation. So maybe the US will become truly ethnically balkanized, like the white/black split but with a larger number of groups.

OPENO: Do you really think that the government has that sort of power?

RESTRICTES: No, but it reflects the values that the broader society chooses to implement.

OPENO: I can blow up your concerns easily by looking at intermarriage. One in four Hispanic newlyweds is married to someone non-Hispanic. For native born Hispanics, it’s 36% and rising. The percentage of marriages that are from separate races/ethnicities has grown from 11% to 15% from 2000 to 2010, part of a much larger trend. This is true for every group in America. How can these groups possibly maintain hostile separatism in the face of that? These categories have never been perfectly discreet, and that’s just going to become more obvious with time. If there’s been one important fact in this entire discussion, it’s that intermarriage rate, which to me obviates so many potential long term problems. Future generations will shed their ethnic identities as being a core part of their identity, just as past immigrant groups did.

RESTRICTES: (How’s that multiracial future working out for Brazil?) It will take a long time for that potential future to come. In the meantime, who knows how identities will solidify? Also, note that the intermarriage rate overstates how many children will be born to mixed couples, as poor people are likelier both to stay within their own ethnicity and to have children out of wedlock. (Over half of Hispanic children are born to unwed mothers.) So even those numbers you give, which I’m not sure deserved that optimistic spin, are overstating things.

OPENO: It’s not just intermarriage, it’s that society is accepting of intermarriage and all it represents…

RESTRICTES: Well, I’d like to look at intermarriage in Europe, and this massive demographic shift as a whole. Europe has a long history of accepting and assimilating intra-European migrants in a multi-generational process that resembles the assimilation of Europeans in America. As I’ve mentioned, groups like Jews and Roma have stood outside this process. From the post-war period to the present, there has been lots of movement within what is now mostly covered by the EU. Though there is variation, by the second generation, basically all European immigrants have intermarriage rates at least as high as Hispanics in America, often breaking 50%. Interestingly, some non-white groups also have very high intermarriage rates – 47% for Black Caribbean men and 61% for Chinese men in the UK. Those are strong signals of successful integration. For the Pakistani second generation in the UK, the numbers are 9% for men (and 2% for women!). The male numbers for Bangladeshi and Indian men are comparably low. And the rates for women are all lower.

OPENO: Indian immigrants aren’t generally Muslim.

RESTRICTES: True. But apparently religion is an effective barrier to intermarriage in both cases – a bigger factor than race. The rates for Turks in Germany are similar (13% for men). Surprisingly, the rate for Algerian men in France may be as high as 50%, perhaps due to France’s closer colonial links with Algeria. Unfortunately, we don’t have numbers for third generation immigrants (mostly because that generation is still young), so we can’t see if there is a further increase in intermarriage. But it’s obviously an overall worse track record than in America, and don’t forget that the Muslim population in Europe is smaller fraction of the population than Latinos in the US, so the numbers are even more worrisome.

OPENO: Those numbers aren’t good, but as you said, we don’t know how things will play out in the future.

RESTRICTES: I’d also like to bring up a related concern: cousin marriage. At least half of Pakistanis in the UK marry their first cousin, compared to one in two hundred in the rest of the country. While occasional cousin marriages aren’t especially harmful – the risks are equivalent to having a child in your 40s – when it keeps happening over generations the genetic risks grow very quickly. “British Pakistanis were 13 times more likely to have children with recessive disorders than the general population.” And there is likely at least some lowering of IQ. Plus clannish closely related families may weaken the state. I don’t want to dwell on this; there’s really not enough research on the topic but I’d keep it in mind.

OPENO: Well, again, I’d expect assimilation to surrounding norms to occur, even if it takes longer than among other groups. I agree that intermarriage and assimilation are surprisingly understudied considering their importance. But let’s turn to demographic changes. We’ve talked about how well immigrants are going to do, but we’ve neglected the magnitude of what’s happening. Immigration from Latin America to the US has slowed considerably due to lower population growth, better economic prospects and better border control, and has now been overtaken by Asian immigration. Most growth in the Hispanic population now comes from natural growth, rather than immigration. So honestly, there’s not too much to be done policy-wise; most of the growth in the Latino population is locked in. Hispanics are projected to go from 17% of the US today to 29% in 2060, due both to higher birthrates and a younger population structure. (There’s some uncertainty* about how people with only partly-Hispanic ancestry will identify going forward.) Obviously the population structure is going to change as immigration flows drop. And Hispanic birth rates are dropping faster than among other Americans. Given that fertility rates in Mexico and the rest of Latin America have been dropping as well, we are likely to see convergence or near-convergence in the fertility of Hispanic and non-Hispanic Americans. The percentage of Latinos will likely reach equilibrium somewhere above 30% and stay there, again depending on how people identify. Of course that’s a big population to absorb, but basically in line with past waves of immigrants.

* I unfortunately forgot to mention it when I was talking about economic assimilation, but there’s a possibility that if richer, more assimilated immigrants are less likely to identify as Latino, then the third generation stagnation might be nothing but some people dropping out of a Hispanic identity. If so, then the 80% economic convergence Restrictes mentioned could be considerably too pessimistic.

RESTRICTES: Still a very large number if there’s even a chance that assimilation isn’t going to work as well this time.

OPENO: And what do you say about Europe?

RESTRICTES: Europe still faces a choice about who to let in. Currently Europe (including Russia and other non-EU countries) is 5.9% Muslim, which will rise to 10.2% in 2050. This is due to the non-Muslim population shrinking, and increases among Muslims due to both natural growth and immigration. Muslims are the only European group to have replacement-level fertility, and that’s lumping recent immigrants and lower-fertility Muslims from Eastern Europe and the Balkans together. Without immigration, the Muslim population would only rise to 8.4%. Of course, if the North Africa-to-Pakistan region remains destabilized for a protracted period, then refugees could come in much greater numbers.

OPENO: That’s considerably lower than I would’ve guessed, really.

RESTRICTES: Yes, but consider that there might not be the same convergence you project for Latinos the US, particularly if migrants keep coming. Also, you said that the proper time scale for considering immigration is at least a century, and this is only 35 years in the future. There aren’t good predictions for 2100, because immigration flows are unpredictable, but once could easily imagine the Muslim population exceeding, say 20%? That’s clearly enough to pose major problems if assimilation fails. And remember, this won’t be an evenly distributed population. Some countries like France will have bigger populations/problems than others.

OPENO: Hmm, I’m less worried about a long term refugee influx to Europe than you. I guess one’s attitude towards these numbers depends mostly on how optimistic you are about immigration in general. It does seem notable that American immigrants are doing better, even though they’re a much larger group.

RESTRICTES: Agreed. I think there’s just one last topic to wrap things up, the effects of emigration on poor countries.

OPENO: That’s not something I’ve really considered. It isn’t immediately obvious whether the net effect would be positive or negative. Emigrants make more money they can send back as remittances – equal to 2% of Mexico’s GDP (and 17% of El Salvador’s!). I assume that has a positive impact. Perhaps it depends on who is leaving, those with graduate degrees, average people, the upwardly mobile, the poorest… There could be a brain drain; “there are currently more African scientists and engineers working in the U.S. than there are in all of Africa”. Or maybe higher remittances pay for better education or other things in the home country? Even if world GDP is sure to go up, the distribution of those gains aren’t clear to me. If you’re mainly concerned with the impact of immigration on the developed world, why are you asking?

RESTRICTES: If emigration sufficiently weakened a poor country and lowered its per capita growth rate, that could keep the income gap wide and encourage more and more immigration in the future. Think about Puerto Ricans being allowed to freely move to the US, or Spaniards able to move anywhere in the EU. There hasn’t been convergence in either case, but rather a massive outflow of people that has weakened the poorer region. With free exit there’s less of a reason to fix your homeland. As population drops, debt-to-GDP rises, taxes go up, and more people leave. With open borders local governance becomes much harder. (We aren’t really talking about open borders here, but as a side note, the actual open borders that already exist don’t seem that great to me.) Of course, the US doesn’t have open borders with Latin America, nor the EU with the Middle East, and things haven’t reached that sort of crisis. But partially open borders may reproduce at least some of these problems.

OPENO: I’m not convinced. Spain’s problems seem much more due to the Eurozone than to Schengen. Poland is in the EU but not the Eurozone. Two million Poles have emigrated in the last ten years, yet Poland has done pretty well economically. In fact emigration likely raised wages. And while Puerto Rico isn’t doing well, it isn’t like the rest of the Caribbean has experienced catch-up growth with the US. These areas have problems beyond open borders, and to the best of my knowledge there’s no good evidence that open borders are a primary culprit in anything. And there’s another open borders region you aren’t considering: the US itself. GDP per capita in Mississippi is half what it is in Connecticut, and yet there hasn’t been some mass destabilization. People move to where wages are higher (or cost of living is lower) and it all pretty much works.

RESTRICTES: Moving has costs, and perhaps the relatively small gaps within the US aren’t enough to encourage that much migration. The gap between Mexican and American wages clearly is. And in fact, given the distribution of federal spending, rich states are paying for the privilege of being in the same nation as poor states. So it isn’t actually clear to me that rich states benefit from having open borders with poor states, as opposed to perhaps just a free trade agreement. I know that’s controversial, and I can’t really back it up with the evidence I’d like. In general, I’m not sure economists look hard enough at unexpected side-effects of free trade and open borders.

OPENO: Sounds to me like you’re grasping at straws. In any case, emigration is complex and we shouldn’t be too quick to lump in intra-EU migration or intra-US migration or migration from the third to the first world. This is another understudied area, but negative impacts of emigration are hard to find. For instance, African countries that send more doctors abroad have better health outcomes. Emigration probably also raises wages in Mexico. Emigration encourages future foreign investment by creating business ties across borders. Perhaps inequality in the home country can go up? The evidence on emigration is ambiguous-to-positive. I’ll grant that there could be unforeseen costs, but given the huge welfare gains to emigrants, I can’t at all see justifying restrictions on movement given the evidence we have.

RESTRICTES: I would agree that the evidence isn’t currently strong enough to prove anything on its own.

OPENO: And with that I think we’ve finally covered the main topics we set out to!

RESTRICTES: And the time has just flown by.

OPENO: Let’s summarize and talk about how our views have changed, if they have. I’m still pro-immigration, but I’ve come to a more nuanced view, hopefully. The clear and significant difference between low skilled immigration to America and to Europe on essentially every measure was a big surprise and I wouldn’t have predicted it. I don’t know what the cause is, but things are definitely going better in the US. Still, even in Europe the economic impact seems pretty unambiguously positive assuming you include the immigrants’ welfare. On both sides of the Atlantic the per capita gains to natives from immigration are smaller than I would’ve expected, but even if it’s break-even, it still makes sense to let people in at no cost to ourselves. That’s true even if there’s less convergence in income than I expect. After all, someone in the US making more money than they would’ve in Mexico but less than me doesn’t necessarily negatively impact me. As for culture, Hispanics commit crime at the average national rate. Assimilation, including language and values, is occurring rapidly. Intermarriage means that ethnic tensions will naturally dissolve over time. I see no good reason to fret about immigration to America. As to Europe, I’m now less certain. I still think that “everything basically works out” is the likeliest outcome, but I’d now assign some non-negligible probability to a serious impossible-to-undo fiasco. I can’t quantify it, but there is a serious worry if things don’t improve. But also remember that many refugees to Europe are coming from very dire circumstances and the welfare gains for them are almost immeasurable. Your closing thoughts?

RESTRICTES: America is doing better than expected, Europe just as badly. I think we agree on most of the facts, but our expectations of how future trends will change – whether intermarriage in Europe will significantly increase, for instance – are quite different. Short of waiting, it’s hard to see how we could resolve these disagreements. But I would like to make a plea to people considering immigration in the future. There is no simple dichotomy between a closed border and letting whoever wants to come into your country. You can and should pick and choose. Even if unskilled immigrants to America do okay in the end, by letting in more skilled immigrants instead you could have done much better. Rather than groups that keep the crime rate the same, you could have lowered it. You could have had more people raising average income and investing more, starting more high tech businesses. No electorate would ever allow truly open borders, so unless you want to run roughshod over democracy there’s going to be a limit on how many immigrants per year you let in. Why not maximize the fraction of those immigrants who are high skilled? I’m not saying discriminate by country of origin, of course. Just set requirements like having a college education or having started a successful business, etc. We already do this to an extent, and countries like Canada follow this model with success. If you want immigrants, there are so many high skilled people from the third world who would choose to work in a developed country. Why not them first, if there are going to be limits? Whether you think low skilled immigration will be good or bad, it seems almost impossible to deny that high skilled immigration would be better, both in the short and long term.

OPENO: I’m not sure there’s such an obvious trade-off between amounts of high and low-skilled immigration, but that sort of political question seems outside our remit. I’ll close with this: immigration is easy to demagogue but hard to understand. Yet given its importance, understanding, foresight and compassion are all vital. Immigration will shape the future in ways we can’t yet understand.

And finally, a quick bonus dialogue in response to this question from Tumblr user Wirehead Wannabe:

Highly recommend this series regardless of your position on the issue.

To Restrictes and Openo: you’ve talked a bit about fertility rates, but only those of people currently living in developed nations. How does open immigration affect total population growth rates? Do countries tend to have a “carrying capacity?”

The scenario I’m worried about is one in which an unpleasant to live in yet fecund nations keeps churning out babies that are doomed to a life of suffering if we don’t let them into our walled gardens, and in which any people who are removed from that situation are replaced by more suffering people that would not have been born if the original people had stayed. So letting people in never actually results in decreased suffering in the donor countries. (I hope that was written clearly enough.)

RESTRICTES: This is similar to my worry that emigration might worsen conditions in poor countries, which might turn an initial wave of emigration into an unending one.

OPENO: Yes, but I think I showed that there was no strong evidence of that sort of negative effect. In fact, emigration likely raised wages in at least some poor countries, which presumably could lead to better education, etc. and thus lower fertility. And in fact essentially every country on Earth has seen a significant drop in fertility over the last few decades:

OPENO: Look at Mexico. About 12% of the population has emigrated, and yet the fertility rate has dropped from 6.8 in the 1960s to 2.2 today. And it’s still dropping, albeit at a slower rate. Similar drops have happened in most poorer countries, whether or not they’ve seen significant emigration. Obviously Africa is the region that still stands out (and Afghanistan and Timor-Leste), but that seems to be entirely a function of poverty rather than emigration. Africa is developing, however haltingly, and I would expect fertility to match the rest of the world sometime within the coming decades. If that happens, there really won’t be anywhere left for the fear of unending, ever-growing hordes to be realized.

RESTRICTES: A drop from 6 children per woman a few decades from now is cold comfort. That could still lead to massive population growth. The UN projects that Africa’s population could quadruple by 2100.

OPENO: True, but letting immigrants in won’t worsen the problem, which was the original question. (And I would take the under on those projections.) And if immigrants acculturate at all to their new country, then we would expect immigration to lower worldwide population growth, as young people keep moving to low fertility regions. I’ve already mentioned that Hispanic fertility has been converging to the American average. Also, for instance, Pakistani fertility is lower in the UK than in Pakistan, and both are dropping.

RESTRICTES: But isn’t that massive growth in Africa reason enough to be concerned, even if overall fertility is in fact dropping? Maybe population growth will resolve itself in the 2100s, but that’s a long time from now. And given how connected the world is now, surely it’s just going to become easier for Africans to leave in the 10s or even 100s of millions. Four billion people would surely precipitate an environmental catastrophe worth fleeing.

OPENO: Maybe, but I’m not sure. Remember that Africa’s population density is actually very low, even excluding the Sahara. (There are fewer people in all of Africa than in India.) A quadrupling of population would mean that Africa’s population density would equal China’s today, which is high but manageable. And African countries are often using cheaper, lower-yield agriculture today because population density is so low that they can afford to. What that means is that Africa has, even ignoring future improvements in agriculture, a large untapped capacity for higher productivity. Migration may increase because it becomes easier, but probably not due to a crisis in Africa.

RESTRICTES: Surely there could be, say, water crises in parts of Africa, or crises due to climate change. You don’t need all of Africa to be a mess for significant emigration. Climate change may cause lower rainfall, more water loss, and worse droughts in Africa.

OPENO: That is possible, and perhaps it’s the biggest potential problem facing Africa. But these problems intersect with social and technological changes in hard to predict ways. How much of Africa’s population will be farming decades from now? Will we develop new, more drought-resistant crops? If African agriculture becomes less productive, will Africans be able to make other exports to buy food from abroad? If they do, then there won’t necessarily be such a huge problem. You can’t consider this in isolation. It doesn’t make much sense to consider the carrying capacity of a single country. What is the carrying capacity of Singapore? There are limits – for instance there simply might not be enough water in the American Southwest for everybody to drink if the population keeps growing, and it isn’t feasible to haul water all the way from the Great Lakes to Phoenix. But other than water, most goods are easy to transport in sufficient quantities, as long as you can produce something worth trading. So a richer, more diversified Africa could withstand climate change, but it’s not guaranteed.

RESTRICTES: It does, however, make sense to speak of a global carrying capacity.

OPENO: With the caveat that there’s no one number of people the Earth can support, it depends on their lifestyle and how efficient their technology is.

RESTRICTES: Yes, but I’m still thinking about climate change. Immigrants to the US produce four times the carbon emissions than they would have in their home countries. It’s true that poor countries are polluting more as they develop, but immigration to rich countries is accelerating that process considerably. Per capita carbon emissions in the developed world have plateaued or even dropped, but population growth counterbalances that. And of course, in general, richer people will use more resources of all types. Immigration is functionally equivalent to development and we haven’t figured out how to do that sustainably.

OPENO: True, but is a higher carbon footprint a cost worth paying, considering all the benefits of modernity? I’m inclined to think so, but it’s a difficult question. In any case, even with more immigration, the problem of how to reduce carbon emissions remains the same.

RESTRICTES: Even if the solution to the problem is the same regardless of immigration, immigration can still be worsening the problem.

Next: The demographics of Brexit and then the dialogue on moral realism

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